Interview: Justin Rose’s Wentworth Dream

Justin, welcome to the BMW PGA Championship. This is a bit of a home game for you. Just tell us how much you enjoy being here at Wentworth.

JUSTIN ROSE: Obviously great to be playing so close to home. The BMW PGA Championship obviously a flagship on the DP World Tour. It feels that way.

It feels like a great tournament. I always feel like this tournament is so well supported.

It does have a good buzz about it, and then obviously there’s the local feel of friends and family coming out to play.

Yeah, a very special week. I always feel like when I start getting my head around the tournament, there’s a month to go, I’ve got to play the course, oh, the course is closed.

I feel like I don’t do a good enough job early enough in the year to get the home course advantage set.

Obviously we all know this course so well. We’ve been coming here for many, many years. Yeah, it’s a wonderful week.

It’s obviously been a pretty positive season for you. How are you feeling coming into this week?

It’s been a good season for sure. I feel like my good golf has been very, very good, and maybe haven’t accessed that good golf as much as I would have liked.

There’s always things to look back on and say, you know what, I would have preferred this or I need to push harder on that.

There’s definitely areas of my game that are holding me back, which I think provide a for the off-season and what I need to work on to continue to compete at the highest level.

I’m excited with where I’m at, what I feel I’m still capable of.

It would be nice to have a strong finish to the season. To compartmentalise the year into the PGA TOUR, FedExCup, and then postseason with the Race to Dubai for the DP World Tour.

Now this sort of next phase is beginning in my mind with some really strong events.

A couple of bucket list tournaments I’d love to win in my career remain, which is this one and the season-ending DP World Tour Championship. Those are two events that definitely are always on my radar.

Two things, please. Your high point of the year, and then what’s the most significant thing that’s happened in golf this year?

My high point of the year would have been record score at Torrey Pines for the Farmers Insurance, now known as The Sentry as of next year.

Winning by seven, that was a nice runaway victory, which I haven’t had many of in my career.

Seeing Tiger Woods play great golf at Torrey Pines in my lifetime, to have the accolade of having a record score there was incredible. The golf I played that week was amazing. So that’s the highlight for me.

Then what’s the biggest thing that’s happened in golf? Maybe it’s happening at the moment with just sort of the structures of the Tours.

There’s been a lot of rumbling for a number of years, but I feel like the PGA TOUR has finally set its destination, set its intention, and set its structure.

Rivalling Tours are sort of finding their way through the transition as well at the moment.

Yeah, I think we’re in the final throes of all that playing out, which is probably the biggest thing.

Is it better now than it was at the beginning of the year?

I think there’s more clarity, which I think players want. I think that when there’s clarity, you know what you’re aiming for, you know what you’re practising for, you know what you’re trying to achieve. That’s a good place for players to be.

I feel like it’s — I’m speaking obviously from very much a PGA TOUR lens at the moment, which is obviously not the be-all end-all in golf, don’t get me wrong, but from that point of view, it does tend to have a knock-on effect for other areas of the game.

There’s a meritocracy there. There’s enough capacity for everybody. These 120-man fields versus 50s and 70s, which is very cutthroat, and I think you get a lot of top players missing out in those scenarios too.

I feel like the structure is very exclusive, very hard earned, but yet there’s enough opportunity there for everybody to play. So I think it’s a nice balance there.

We’ve heard rumours from 2028 onwards about a global fall series, DP World Tour and PGA TOUR combined. I’m just curious, is there anywhere you’d like the DP World Tour to go to that it hasn’t been before or maybe somewhere it doesn’t currently go?

For me personally, places that I would personally like to play more golf again that I have played in my career would be Japan and Australia.

I think they’re great venues that have a great golf history, great golf heritage, great golf fan base that I personally feel I haven’t really had the opportunity to go and play in the last decade at least.

For me, just sweeping statement, that’s what I would like, yeah.

Really, 2028, the fall of 2028 feels like a long time away. So certainly don’t have any strong thoughts on that.

You talked about this being a bucket list event. What do you feel has held you back here in the past?

I mean, there’s a lot of tournaments I haven’t won. I guess I’ve been close. I’ve had two seconds.

Lost in a playoff to Anders Hansen back in the day, 2007, and duked with out with Luke Donald in 2012. I’m sure I’ve had some opportunities since then, but nothing is close.

Sometimes a bit of circumstance. Other times — yeah, nothing I can really put my finger on. Is it a busy week for me? Yeah. Is there too much distraction? Maybe.

If I had to choose one thing, it would just be the distraction of playing at home. It hasn’t always been home for me. I can’t really make that as an excuse. That’s really only been recent years. Yeah, hard to put my finger on it.

Q. And you mentioned the restructuring of Tours and things over the next couple of years. Where do you hope to see the DP World Tour when that kicks in in 2028?

JUSTIN ROSE: I think obviously having a really strong presence. I think the PGA TOUR has become more intense in terms of the competition to have your spot, and also the calendar has condensed as well. It’s very much cutthroat. It’s very much packed in. It’s very much quality event after quality event, but it leaves a lot of room open in a 12-month calendar.

So it leaves huge opportunity as well for some very special events and for players to enjoy travelling the world playing a sport that they love. I think there’s huge opportunity for the DP World Tour going forward, yeah.

Q. Could you talk about the difference between Luke Donald when he first became captain and what he’s like now.

I think I’ve said — I’m not sure if I’ve said it publicly, but I’d be willing to, I think that Luke has used the captaincy so incredibly well to sort of grow as an individual and so impressively so.

I think that he has really taken on that leadership role with all that he’s got.

I think he’s really challenged himself to read up about leadership, to surround himself by great people.

I’m sure he’s learned so much along the way, and he’s just been such a steady, safe, and calm pair of hands but so well-versed. I think he’s created a lot of trust because of that.

As a player and maybe as a character, he’s sort of naturally introverted, which maybe doesn’t necessarily — like wouldn’t be your preconceived idea to sort of think what a leader is all about, but I think what Luke brings is that calm, steady, very much meticulous approach that served him so well with his own career.

Yet he’s sort of found it within himself to become incredibly inspiring as well, which I think is a great combination.

Q. Have there been any courses that you’ve played this year that have been particularly badly affected by weather?

Royal Birkdale. Obviously it was one of those summers we had at Muirfield, I think 2013 it was.

Not badly affected in a bad sense, but when you think of how an Open is going to play out, it played very differently to that.

When you structured your game plan at the beginning of the week, by the end part of the week, you were doing something completely different just because you started to understand what was in your mind, the previous penalty for a miss was no longer there anymore because it was burnt out or for whatever reason.

I would say that’s where weather affected how you saw and how you played a golf course for sure.

What irons does Justin Rose use?